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Man Held in Shootings That Terrorized Michigan Town

The suspect, Raulie Wayne Casteel, whose picture was displayed at a news conference, offered no motive for the attacks, officials said.Credit
Stephen McGee for The New York Times

WIXOM, Mich. — He chose his targets with no discernible pattern, firing at Cadillacs, minivans and pickup trucks, at young drivers and older ones, at men on their way to work, fans heading for the ballpark and women picking up their children from school, his shooting attacks stretching through four counties along the Interstate 96 corridor.

On Tuesday, the biggest topic of discussion in this middle-class suburb northwest of Detroit was not the election results — the city split its presidential vote — but the announcement that the police had taken into custody a local man believed to be the Wixom highway gunman.

Raulie Wayne Casteel, 43, is expected to be arraigned on Friday before an Oakland County District Court judge on charges that include two counts of assault with intent to commit murder. He will participate from his jail cell in Livingston County, where he was arraigned on Wednesday in connection with a shooting there.

The police and prosecutors said they thought Mr. Casteel was responsible for 24 separate attacks, which wounded only one person, a man who was shot in the buttocks as he was driving to a World Series game. Mr. Casteel is likely to face additional state and federal charges, officials said.

The arrest ended three weeks of terror for residents of this city of about 14,000, who had been nervously eyeing every car they passed and taking side streets to avoid the highway and Wixom Road, where several vehicles were hit.

On days when the gunman was most active, the city’s schools kept students inside. The annual Halloween party at a community center went on as scheduled, but with a heavy police presence. Frightened mothers called the Police Department saying they were afraid to let their children go out for ice cream cones or play on the street, said the Wixom police chief, Clarence Goodlein, whose department led a multiagency task force formed to investigate the shootings.

The city, unaccustomed to serious crime — Wixom has had no homicides this year and “I can’t think of the last time we had a gunshot wound,” Chief Goodlein said — settled into the realization that it was as vulnerable as anywhere else to random and senseless violence.

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The shootings took place over three weeks along the I-96 corridor.Credit
Stephen McGee for The New York Times

“We were so scared,” said Delynn Harris, a waitress at Backyard Coney Island, a diner about a quarter of a mile from one of the shooting sites. “We didn’t know where he was or what was going to happen next.”

Like other restaurants here, the diner lost business because customers were afraid to venture out, another economic blow for a struggling city where jobs are scarce and foreclosures frequent. The Ford assembly plant on Wixom Road — the site of the city’s last high-profile crime, an attack by a gunman that left one dead and three wounded in November 1996 — closed down five years ago.

Chief Goodlein said that initially, the nature of the attacks was uncertain, but it gradually became clear that they were dealing with something far more serious than a juvenile prank.

At about 7:05 p.m. on Oct. 16, a man stepped out of his house on Hopkins Drive to put out the trash and felt bullets speeding by his head. About 10 minutes later, an employee at a dance studio on Wixom Road, just around the corner, reported hearing a volley of gunfire. In the next few minutes, four cars driving in the northbound lane were hit in rapid succession.

The next day brought another shooting, in Commerce Township. The day after that Aaron Mason, the owner of a tool company, was driving his Ford Edge north on Wixom Road to visit a customer about 2:15 when he heard a loud bang.

“I thought it was actually a rock hit my windshield or my tire blew out of something; so I pulled over,” Mr. Mason said. He found a bullet lodged in the driver’s seat.

By 6:30 that night, reports were coming in of similar attacks on Interstate 96 and in other counties.

“We started putting it together and counting the number of incidents, and the hair on everybody’s neck started to stand up,” Chief Goodlein said.

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“We were so scared,” said Delynn Harris, a waitress in Wixom, Mich.Credit
Stephen McGee for The New York Times

Still, the investigative task force, which eventually grew to more than 100 members from local law enforcement agencies, the F.B.I., the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Michigan State Police, had little to go on except bullets and bullet fragments, a shell casing and sketchy descriptions by witnesses of a dark-colored car that whizzed by, its driver firing out the window.

Rewards were offered. Tip lines were set up. Technology helped — bullets collected after different shootings, forensic analysis indicated, had been fired by the same gun, a 9-millimeter pistol.

But in the end, Chief Goodlein said, it came down to old-fashioned legwork. Investigators came in early and worked late, going through frame after frame of surveillance tapes from businesses along the gunman’s routes, sifting through more than 2,800 tips from callers and narrowing down lists of thousands of cars to find the one that mattered.

On Monday night, Mr. Casteel was arrested at a brick two-story house on a quiet cul-de-sac, where he had moved in with relatives some months ago, bringing his wife and young daughter.

“He was very nice, very personable, just very much about his daughter and doing things with her,” said a neighbor, James Parr.

The police seized several guns at the house and Mr. Casteel’s car, a dark gray Chevy Malibu.

A person familiar with the investigation said a tip about the shooter’s license plate — it had a Michigan State alumni frame and a green “S” on the left-hand side — helped lead investigators to Mr. Casteel.

But his motive remains elusive. Mr. Casteel has been silent about the shootings, the police said.

In posts on Twitter, Mr. Casteel railed against President Obama, his health law and political corruption in the courts. In a cover letter on LinkedIn, which said he graduated from Michigan State with a degree in geoscience, he wrote of the “down economic environment.” A public defender at the arraignment in Livingston County said that family members had spoken of mental health problems.

In Wixom, people were just happy that it was over.

The shootings, said Deacon Bob Dreyer, who lives with his wife near the site of the first attack, put Wixom on the map.

“But it will drop off the map again now that the guy got caught,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on November 9, 2012, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Man Held in Shootings That Terrorized Michigan Town. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe